Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

Alan Johnson thinks it is dangerous to make the police answerable to the public

Alan Johnson makes an interesting allegation about the Government proposal to replace police authorities with directly elected police commissioners: this move would be "dangerous", he claims, because it would "politicise" the police.

Presumably what Mr Johnson means by "politicise" is that it would make police forces democratically accountable to real people. In other words, when central government dictates police policy along its own favoured ideological lines, that is not "political" but when local communities have an influence on the priorities and tactics of the policing of their own neighbourhoods, that is dangerously "politicised". Peculiar conception of democracy, this. How many other areas of national life would Mr Johnson like to see removed from the sinister influence of public opinion? Health? Education? Tax and benefits?